Demilitarization in the Contemporary World ed. by Peter Stearns (review)

Only a book on the imminent outbreak of world peace could be more unexpected than a volume dedicated to the contemporary state of demilitarization. A look at a newspaper in any country, any place in the world carries news of wars of every variety and the growing militarization, particularly in the US, of the police force, of civil society, of the government itself. Yet the editor and essayists in Peter Stearns’ collection Demilitarization in the Contemporary World make the case that the history of demilitarization is particularly important for the current moment. The word demilitarization can mean no more than demobilization in any given post-war period. Thought of this way it does not have much purchase — for mobilizations follow demobilization with depressing frequency. But a focus on particular cases of demilitarization allows an expanded definition and an analysis of the devolution of the militarization.

The case studies include essays on post-war and post-unification Germany by Andrew Bickford and Jay Lockenour and an important discussion of the role of German peace movements by Holger Nehring. A second section focuses on Japan, with a discussion of “constrained rearmament” by Yoneyuki Sugita, Gerald Hook on the domestic and foreign pressures on Japanese security policies, Christopher Hughes on the push toward constitutional revision and a comparative essay on post–World War II demilitarization by Stephanie Trombley Averill. A concluding set of essays address, surprisingly, Central America. Peter Stearns opens and closes the book with summary essays.

Germany appears here not singly but doubly, even triply: the German Democratic Republic (gdr), the Federal Republic of Germany (frg), and the Berlin Republic as Jay Lockenour names Germany after reunification. Under the Allied Occupation all of Germany was demilitarized in the sense that it was demobilized. (However, unlike the recent American occupation of Iraq, a German police force was maintained in all four zones to keep order.) The same was true in Japan. In both places, remilitarization came at the behest of the United States, though both countries acquiesced. In both countries too there was popular resistance based directly on the recent experience of total war. In both, remilitarization was at best partial or, as Sugita puts it about Japan “constrained.” We can read the cases of Japan and Germany in two ways: how remilitarization is inevitable or how fierce the ongoing resistance to full military mobilization remains.

The opening sentences of Stephanie Trombley Averill’s essay, “Demilitarization and Democracy in the Post–World War II World,” evokes what seems a distant historical era when it was “axiomatic” that democracies did not begin wars, and the words demilitarization and democracy were synonymous (p. 157). Initially, US policy toward both Japan and Germany was based on the proposition that demilitarization would protect the fragile democracies emerging from the ashes of fascist wars. But shortly America’s conviction that the German and Japanese armed force would be essential to its anti-Soviet project reversed the field. Now, according to the US, militarization was necessary to protect democracy. But as Averill insists, “the fact that political institutions preceded and predominated over the limited military cannot be overstated. It allowed for space — temporal and psychological — for democracy to take root and become the principal characteristics of the Bundeswehr and the Self-Dense Forces” (p. 168). Remilitarization has remained limited and the significant peace culture that continues (against many odds) to dominate both countries is not experienced as something imposed from outside but as a “markedly indigenous creature, embraced by populations devastated by the consequences of their own histories of militarism” (p. 177).

Of the cases discussed, only Costa Rica was self-demilitarizing. In an essay comparing Costa Rica and Honduras, Kirk Bowman analyzes the links theorists and US policy-makers drew between the state and the military. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the political scientist and former official in the Reagan administration, was clear: “Costa Rica is not a viable country, because it has no military” (p...